Mojo - August 2007

Dozens of Iraqi artists have been painting murals along miles of concrete blast walls throughout Baghdad, and the American military is paying a portion of the bill. To learn more, read this post on Mother Jones' arts and culture blog, The Riff.

The government concluded its case against Jose Padilla today. Gone is any real talk of the dirty bomb that Attorney General John Ashcroft made such a splash with just as the administration was taking heat from the 9/11 Commission for ignoring the warnings of Coleen Rowley and others (go to our Iraq War Timeline and look at June 2002). After spending 3 1/2 years in solitary confinement without access to an attorney, Padilla's been charged with attending an Al Qaeda terror camp, and thus being part of a conspiracy to murder. Via Reuters:

The main evidence against Padilla is what the government calls an al Qaeda application form bearing his fingerprints, birthdate and similar background. It was recovered in Afghanistan and says the author speaks English, Spanish and Arabic, graduated from high school and trained as a carpenter, as Padilla did.

It used a name prosecutors contend was Padilla's alias, and lists as his sponsor a man whose name was in Padilla's address book when he was arrested.

Padilla's defense is expected to argue his fingerprints could have got on the form when investigators handed it to him to examine after his arrest.

Attention trilingual journeymen carpenters everywhere: Watch your back! Now Padilla may have been an Al Qaeda wannabe or even the real deal. But it seems unlikely we'll ever get to the bottom of that given that

Padilla was held without charge for 3-1/2 years before being indicted in a civilian court in November 2005 on charges that do not mention any bomb plot. The bomb allegations came from alleged al Qaeda operatives who have said they were tortured during interrogation before being sent to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Anything Padilla might have told interrogators in the military brig about such a plot would be inadmissible because he was denied access to an attorney for most of the time he was there.

Just an update from the war on terror. You can find all of Mother Jones' extensive coverage of the Padilla case here.

In light of the big retirement announcement, the media has spent the day gushing over Karl Rove. But it's worth asking some tough questions. Besides the fact that he got an intellectual lightweight with no particular qualifications for the office elected to the presidency, what has Karl Rove done? That is, what will he be remembered for post-2000? Andrew Sullivan takes a crack:

The man's legacy is a conservative movement largely discredited and disunited, a president with lower consistent approval ratings than any in modern history, a generational shift to the Democrats, a resurgent al Qaeda, an endless catastrophe in Iraq, a long hard struggle in Afghanistan, a fiscal legacy that means bankrupting America within a decade, and the poisoning of American religion with politics and vice-versa.

Too much blame? One could argue that Rove always got too much credit, and this is simply the flip side of the coin. Regardless, there's no way to spin this man's legacy as a success. Sullivan's not done. "Rove is one of the worst political strategists in recent times," he writes. "He took a chance to realign the country and to unite it in a war — and threw it away in a binge of hate-filled niche campaigning, polarization and short-term expediency." Conservatism is not entrenched in the American identity, as Rove had intended. It is a dying breed in many parts of the country, and increasingly unpopular even in its former strongholds.

Dan Froomkin of the Postagrees, writing that Rove "leaves his party in worse shape than he found it, with his boss profoundly discredited in the eyes of the American people." Froomkin also writes that part of the blame for this failed administration will "accrue to Rove for choosing to use national security as a wedge issue."

And that's the key point. Rove, a campaigner, was handed the keys to the White House car in every instance. Remember when faith-based initiatives czar John DiIulio resigned in disgust and said, "What you've got is everything and I mean everything being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis"? When you actually govern with the exclusive aim of building partisan advantage, you are inevitably headed for disaster. The United States of America's priorities are not the same as the GOP's priorities, and while the goal of the presidency is to further the former, this administration was always interested in the latter. Throw in hubris, incompetency, and an obstinate unwillingness to hear outside views, and you've got one of the worst presidencies in the history of the Republic. Quite a genius, that Karl.

[Rove] and Bush overlooked the epochal growth of economic insecurity in America. They refused to see that the very economic changes they celebrated had made Americans understandably nervous and pessimistic to an unprecedented extent about the nation's long-term economic prospects. And so, as employers were abandoning their provision of retirement benefits to employees, Bush and Rove called for abandoning the government's commitment as well. At a time when ordinary Americans' incomes were stagnating, and when growing numbers of Americans understood that they were in some nebulous competition with millions of lower-paid workers in other lands that the government seemed powerless to mitigate, Bush and Rove proposed legalizing the undocumented immigrants who had flowed across the border.

Could there have been a more profound misreading of the American temper?

According to news reports (here and here), a Turkish passenger ferry has collided with a Ukrainian-flagged cargo ship in the Marmara Sea, off the coast of Istanbul. Passengers sustained minor injuries, and according to Turkish authorities, maritime traffic in the nearby Bosporus Straight was unaffected. End of story? Not quite.

I traveled to Istanbul in 2005, in part to investigate the growing weight of international maritime shipping through the Bosporus, which runs through the heart of the city and divides it between Europe and Asia. Whatever might be said of today's accident in the Marmara, we should expect worse.

The Bosporus, which connects the Marmara Sea in the south to the Black Sea in the north, is among the most difficult stretches of water in the world for ship captains to navigate. During any given passage, they must execute about a dozen significant changes of course to avoid slamming into Istanbul's heavily populated shores. Strong and unpredictable currents can push and pull ships off course. Sudden dense fog and blinding rains are common.

The tankers that face these hazards are some of the oldest and worst maintained currently afloat. Recent oil spills off the coasts of France and Spain have caused European countries to tighten their controls. Many of the older ships that cannot meet the new standards have been shunted off to poorer, less developed countries, like those that line the shores of the Black Sea. The average oil tanker based there is now over twenty years old, more than twice the average age of similar vessels working out of European and American ports.

As these tankers pass the Bosporus, they are forced to play dangerous games of chicken with countless numbers of smaller merchant ships, passenger ferries, commercial fishing boats, naval and coast guard vessels, and leisure craft that crowd the Bosporus on a typical day. To many of the people of Istanbul, the constant presence of crude-laden tankers just offshore is barely worth a second thought. To be sure, there are occasional protests, including an annual demonstration by local environmental groups that fills the strait with small boats and prevents tankers from passing for a few hours. But overall, the city seems fairly resigned to its fate, placing its trust in the hands of foreign captains working for foreign companies under foreign flags. To visitors, too, the ships are less objects of concern than part of Istanbul's exotic charm, a constant reminder of the city's unique place in the world.

But tankers are not decorations; they are complex machines, and like all such things, they are prone to failure, often catastrophic failure. They explode. They run aground. They collide with other ships. They lose their steering and strike businesses and houses on the tightly crowded shore, killing or maiming the people inside. Or they do some combination of these things. The list of possible failures doubles as a virtual catalogue of accidents that have actually occurred on the Bosporus in recent years. As traffic grows more intense, so too does the risk of more and perhaps more serious accidents.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Friday signed into law the controversial Interception of Communications Bill, which gives his government the authority to eavesdrop on phone and Internet communications and read physical mail...

Communications Minister Christopher Mushowe said Zimbabwe is not unique in the world in passing such legislation, citing electronic eavesdropping programs in the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa, among other countries.

When the brutal dictator of a failed state cites you as inspiration, you've really lived up to your ideals, wouldn't you say?

It gives new meaning to the term "power suit." The son of former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet has announced that he will be selling his late father's suits. A tailor's shop in central Santiago will handle the sales of several vintage suits worn by the leader of Chile's military junta from the 1980s until his death last year at the age of 91. They will retail for about $2,000 each. For those of you thinking the suits might useful for, say, reviewing a parade of tanks and missiles on your town's Main Street, think again. The dicator's son, Augusto Pinochet Hiriart, says the suits are meant for everyday use. As he told a reporter from Chile's La Tercera newspaper, "They are the best, modern suits that [my father] used at home or to go out for special activities, though not for special ceremonies."

Rove has said he's going back to Texas to spend more time with his family. Awww, that's nice. But then what? I wouldn't expect him to stay out of politics for long. One only has to read a few sentences into "Revenge of the Nerds," our piece on high school policy debaters, to realize how deep and long standing is Rove's love of playing hardball:

It would have been the spring of 1969, the Vietnam War in full swing, when a scrawny 18-year-old in a suit and tie and horn-rimmed glasses pushed a handcart stacked with 10 boxes into a classroom at Olympus High School, on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. Each shoebox was stuffed with four-by-six notecards pasted with evidence clipped from newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. As the young man and his partner unpacked their evidence on a small table at the front of the room, members of the other policy debate team looked on in horror. They'd only brought one shoebox.

What they didn't know was that 99 percent of the notecards in the Olympus team's 10 shoeboxes were just props. Even at 18, the scrawny kid with the horn-rims understood the power of intimidation."Rove didn't just want to win," James Moore and Wayne Slater write in their book Rove Exposed: How Bush's Brain Fooled America. "He wanted the opponents destroyed. His worldview was clear even then. There was his team and the other team, and he would make the other team pay."

This isn't a man that's going to be content going back to Texas and raising chickens. And though the 2006 rout of the RNC may taken the bloom off Rove's rose somewhat, "the architect" has still got to be a highly sought-after campaign consultant. Provided he can modernize his direct mail data mining/smear expertise to dovetail with the whole cell phone/social networking/video wave of the future. But let's assume he can.

So any bets as to where Rove will pop up? Fred Thompson seems to be running as the "most like Bush" candidate; could that strategy include Rove? Will Rove sit this election out entirely, perhaps scouting the next feckless son of a prominent politician?

Thompson had more or less wagered everything on Iowa, and after finishing sixth in Saturday's straw poll he decided to call it quits. Here are the full results of the straw poll, which I remind you, aren't worth much. But nevertheless, take a good look at John McCain's numbers. He didn't campaign in the poll (nor did Giuliani or Fred Thompson), but heavens to Betsy: